Posts tagged ‘crime map’

Lately, there has been a widespread trend toward use of web 2.0 tools and social media in law enforcement. Although these tools are great for communication and maintaining connections between citizens and law enforcement, they—in and of themselves—will not decrease crime significantly. Sure, web 2.0 crime mapping can provide an advantage to neighborhood watch groups, but public-facing crime mapping will not necessarily reduce crime if it is not coupled with a variety of other personal crime-prevention strategies.

What we’re talking about is not simply looking at the results of crime, through crime mapping, statistics, and sharing crime tips through Facebook, but using that information to target physical aspects of the community that encourage crime. For neighborhood watch groups this means not just watching out for crime, but actively paying attention to physical aspects of your community that may increase chances for crime.

Physical Aspects of Your Neighborhood

Look around your community. How many neighbors have their porch light on at night? How many lawns look unkempt? How many houses have bushes under their windows? How many houses have large windows facing the street? How many houses have fences? The answers to these questions may help you root out some aspects that make your neighborhood more attractive to criminals.

Strategies

Overall street appearance, like nicely manicured lawns, attractive bushes, and accent lighting, sends a message to criminals that the homeowners care about their property and keep an eye on it—and might have security systems. Unkempt lawns and neglected trees and shrubs, are a sign that maybe other aspects of the home are untended too, like door and window locks.

Street and porch lighting deter criminals who generally don’t want to be in the spotlight. And, coupled with street-facing windows, make criminals feel uncomfortable, like they are being watched and could easily be identified.

At first, you would think that high fences would keep criminals out, but that is not always true. Waist-high fences or shrubs lining your property actually provide two benefits: they act as a barrier that is awkward to cross, and they give you street visibility. With high fences, you won’t know a criminal is coming until he hops the fence or enters the gate. With a waist-high barrier, you can them coming from a mile away.

Finally, there is a very simple way to block access to your windows, plant thorny bushes under them. I know it sounds kind of silly, but faced with the prospect of pushing his way through a thorn bush to get to your bedroom window, most criminals will pass your windows up for easier targets.

Solutions

These are all aspects of your property and neighborhood that you can control. Talk to your neighbors about implementing strategies to deter criminals before they even get to your house. In addition, you can talk to your city council about street-lighting issues as well as public signage (like neighborhood watch signs) and other physical aspects of your neighborhood that are city property.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is leading the way in sex offender tracking by issuing 6,000 GPS tracking bracelets to paroled sex offenders across the state.

The tracking bracelets send GPS information to a central server every 10 minutes so that analysts can map movement and anchor points for sex offenders. The system will also alert parole officers if a sex offender’s GPS data shows a correlation between a sex offender’s location and the time and location of a recent crime.

Clearly this system cannot predict a sex offender’s movements or the likelihood that he or she will re-offend; however, with the knowledge that their movements are being tracked, sex offenders will be less likely to travel into restricted areas and less likely to re-offend. And in the event that they are involved in a crime, the tracking system will make it easier to catch and prosecute the offenders.

Yesterday we just passed 500 fans on Facebook. We’ve only had the Facebook page up for a about 8 weeks, so we’re overjoyed that so many people are enthusiastic about their local crime prevention efforts and are using CrimeReports.com.

We want to thank every one of our law enforcement partners across the US and Canada and all the fans that have made our website the #1 crime-mapping website in the world.

Keep up your continued efforts to spread the word about CrimeReports.com, neighborhood watch efforts, and effective law enforcement/citizen communication and partnerships. And, as always, keep coming back here for more information on crime prevention, community involvement, and neighborhood watch.

Google just announced some improvements to its popular mapping program, Google Maps. Google Maps now includes icons for landmarks, places of interest, and major businesses. In addition, many of the icons are clickable and will bring up a picture, address, phone number, and—possibly—a Wikipedia article.

This new feature of Google Maps is good news for CrimeReports.com users. The addition of the new location icons will make it easier to get a tangible sense of the location and proximity of crimes plotted on the CrimeReports map. This increased spatial awareness can lead to a better understanding of where crimes are happening in relation to physical landmarks and businesses.

We at CrimeReports are all very happy about our recent growth and our record-breaking month of June. Below is a press release highlighting our recent success and the law enforcement community’s forward-thinking views on sharing crime information with the public:

June represents a record-breaking month for CrimeReports.com, signing new partnerships with 49 law enforcement agencies across the U.S. These new partnerships represent close to a 10 percent growth for the world leader in online crime mapping in the last month. Currently, CrimeReports publishes live crime information for close to 500 law enforcement agencies across North America and is working with more than 50 others that will begin publishing their crimes live within the next 60 days.

CrimeReports’ rapid growth indicates a trend in law enforcement away from traditional weekly crime blotters and toward the use of online communication, including social media, to disseminate crime information more quickly and efficiently. As a result, publishing crime maps and providing crime alerts, like those provided by CrimeReports, is quickly becoming the standard for forward-thinking agencies across North America. “From a customer service perspective, let’s get that online so people can do their own analysis of what’s going on in the neighborhood,” said Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis, discussing CrimeReports in a recent Boston Herald article.

Although there are other crime-mapping websites, few can boast partnerships with more than a few dozen agencies, whereas CrimeReports is signing up an average of 30 agencies a month. “Our growth has been astounding,” said Greg Whisenant, Founder and CEO of CrimeReports. “We started with one agency just two years ago, so our explosive growth really shows how law enforcement agencies have been hungry for a service like this and have been amazingly forward thinking in adopting it so quickly.”

In addition, CrimeReports’ internal-facing analytics tool, Command Central, is now being used by nearly 50 agencies nationwide and will expand further in the coming months.

The Texas Department of Public Safety recently updated their sex offender website. The new website allows users to search for sex offenders by name, zip code, address, and more. And citizens can sign up for free email alerts for changes in an offender’s record or if they move. The improved site also provides more details information on the offender’s history and offenses, including offenses committed out of state.

A reporter at KEPR, the Pasco, Washington CBS affiliate, recently took crime data into her own hands and created a car theft crime map. The map highlighted areas of the city where car thefts, prowls, and burglaries are highest. When presented with the map, the local police denied the significance of the data on the map, and chalked it up to population density. If you go to the KEPR website, you can read or watch a video of the story.

Did the reporter identify a hotspot, or are the police right? Leave a comment.

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The views expressed in this blog are those of the individual contributing bloggers and may not necessarily reflect the official or actual opinions of CrimeReports, its parent company Public Engines, or any of its employees.